Let's travel back to 1994, the year that alternative rock band Soundgarden last played in Milwaukee.

O.J. Simpson was charged with killing Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman. "Schindler's List" won the Academy Award for best picture. "The Sign" by Ace of Base and "I Swear" by All-4-One were two of the year's biggest songs. Mark Zuckerberg turned 10.

Nearly three years after that July 2 Marcus Amphitheater show at Summerfest, Soundgarden broke up. In November, it returned with "King Animal," its first studio album in 16 years. And Friday at the Rave's Eagles Ballroom, Soundgarden is playing its first show in Milwaukee in nearly 20 years. Not surprisingly, it's sold out. All of the band's winter dates are.

"It's almost like a homecoming in a sense," frontman Chris Cornell said in a recent phone interview. "This is something that we know was special, and we get the opportunity to not just sit around the room and talk about the good old days, but to participate in it like normal, healthy human beings."

Soundgarden found fame after the grunge groups Nirvana and Pearl Jam had already drawn the spotlight to Seattle's music scene. But Cornell, guitarist Kim Thayil and original bassist Hiro Yamamoto had started the band in 1984, before those groups were born. In those early tours, the band would make $200 a show, barely enough to get to the next gig, Cornell said.

It even played Milwaukee before there was a Pearl Jam, performing two dates at the long-gone Odd Rock Café in 1989. Cornell confessed that the "great" show "at a fairly small, dirty club" was the only memory he had of Soundgarden in Milwaukee.)

Label troubles

At that point though, Soundgarden was already signed to A&M Records. In the eyes of some fans, the band's appearance on a corporate label, the first grunge band to get such a deal, wasn't seen as a vast accomplishment, but as selling out.

Nor was the band comfortable with life on a major record label, which over time contributed to the breakup.

"We seemed to be more suited for taking care of all the business ourselves," Cornell said. "Once the business got so big, there were a lot of other people in the community, and the whole thing became more complicated.

"I remember for our albums on A&M, the art department had their own building, and they were always late, and everything would be all done at the last minute and there'd be a ton of confusion. The amount of money and resources didn't translate to a direct approach, and that is what we were used to."

But the band was able to push those grievances aside, and push beyond its metal and grunge origins, with its complex and dense 1994 album "Superunknown." Led by the enduring single "Black Hole Sun," with its psychedelic quirkiness, and bolstered by the iconic, creepy images of smiling suburbanites in the "Sun" music video, "Superunknown" sold north of 5 million copies in the United States.

Yet the success of "Superunknown" only exacerbated the band's unease with its lot in the music business.

"I've never been one to complain about success. That's stupid, and we were lucky to have it," Cornell said. "But it's a pressure cooker and an intense environment."

Bassist Ben Shepherd, who replaced Yamamoto in 1990, recalled that before the band went on hiatus, a tour was being booked "for an album that hadn't even been recorded yet. That's mind-boggling, and that's when you say, 'No, no, no, everybody back off!' "

"Probably half of it was the burnout syndrome," Cornell said of the breakup in 1997. "But we needed to take a break. . . . And everybody was kind of happy not having the responsibility of being in Soundgarden anymore."

Different paths

The band members went on to different things. Most notably, Matt Cameron became the drummer for Pearl Jam in 1998, while Cornell released three solo albums and fronted supergroup Audioslave featuring members of Rage Against the Machine from 2001 to 2007.

"But every experience musically I had outside Soundgarden, I felt somewhat vulnerable," Cornell said. "Soundgarden really was it. It was the first time I was in with a group of people where there was that strange thing you refer to as chemistry.

"You can't define it, but it's there. . . . It's almost like the first-love syndrome. We went through so much as a band as Soundgarden, I could never think of anything the same way."

The years after Soundgarden's split moved quickly, Shepherd said.

"We were so busy with other projects, but we suddenly realized . . . it was hard to find a Soundgarden shirt," he said.

"We didn't really have any tools in place to continue to communicate with fans, whether old fans or new fans, or to create future fans," Cornell said. "We didn't have a website. We didn't have a fan club. The record company was not making any effort at all promoting our catalog. It was our responsibility if we wanted to have a musical legacy."

That's what brought the latest lineup of Soundgarden back together again.

"As a circumstance of spending time together and conducting business together, I think there was an awareness that everyone was into it, and we all missed each other and the camaraderie, and it led us to doing everything else," Cornell said

After some initial shows and the release of a compilation album in 2010, "we decided we might as well do the cool part and make up songs," Shepherd said.

"The chemistry was immediately there. It was to me like a day later than many years," he said of making "King Animal." "The only inner pressure was to not put out something where people said, 'Oh, man, they shouldn't have reunited.' But there was really no expectation. There was more excitement to see what the other guys could come up with and what we all would come up with together."

A few things were different, for the better. The band was in a better position to call more of the business decisions and collaborate with "people that are interested in what we do," Shepherd said.

And while "King Animal" features the kind of muscular and intellectual sound that brought it fame ("it's heavy metal for people who don't like heavy metal," Cornell said), the songwriting process had some new aspects.

For the first time, Shepherd wrote the music for a song, the head thrasher "Non-State Actor," for which Thayil provided the lyrics. And Cameron, with his Pearl Jam experience, "was actually way more upfront and assertive about getting the whole thing going," Shepherd said.

"On 'King Animal,' there are many songs where I feel like, 'That was the great Soundgarden song that we didn't write and now we have,' " Cornell said, mentioning the melodic, acoustic-led "Black Saturday" and "A Thousand Days Before," with its Middle Eastern-inspired guitar riffs, as examples.

Being in Soundgarden again, Cornell said, "is a chance to fix things that I never felt were necessarily the way they could be, in terms of what I brought, in terms of what I'd sing or what I would play.

"I was always trying to do better and evolve. Soundgarden is the vehicle for that. It was always challenging."

IF YOU GO

Who: Soundgarden

When: 8 p.m. Friday

Where: Eagles Ballroom, The Rave, 2401 W. Wisconsin Ave.

Tickets: Sold out

About Piet Levy

Piet Levy covers music for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and TapMilwaukee.com. For more music updates, you can also follow him on Facebook and Instagram​.